Wasteland 2 delayed but on budget, beta coming in October

InXile alleged to be "mildly smug" over out-managing Double Fine

Wasteland 2 is six weeks behind schedule, inXile boss Brian Fargo has admitted, but doesn’t require additional funding and is on track to be the largest RPG he’s ever worked on.

In an update to Kickstarter backers, Fargo said inXile expects to have a feature complete version of Wasteland 2 within the next month, which is later than expected but not too surprising “considering the increased scope” of the project thanks to Kickstarter over-funding.

Fargo said having just one game on the go at once and working with Unity has helped speed the project along, and that inXile’s careful management means the huge project is not at financial risk.

“I can happily announce that we remain well financed for development, thus allowing us to ship a product without compromise. This is primarily due to our disciplined spending, project planning and the benefit of our back catalog sales to cover any extra product features and content we loved,” he said.

“One of the unique aspects to our crowd funding campaign is that we greatly overfunded which is wonderful in allowing us to create a larger experience, one that is in fact quite epic in size. It could well be the largest RPG I have worked on to date. Of course there is an inherent struggle with the original date hovering despite our greatly increased budget and design.

“As a producer I always find myself in a conflicting role of both pushing on the design and detail to achieve something special yet at the same time keep it on schedule but that is the job. I’m quite pleased with Wasteland 2 from both a graphical and creative aspect; the scope of the game will be quite a surprise for people.”

The feature-complete build will be used for several rounds of alpha testing, both internally and externally, but the RPG will really go public in October, when Fargo expects to be able to beign beta testing with over 10,000 Kickstarter backers. Once beta testing is complete, the team will set a new release date.

“Thanks to this new crowd sourced model of game production we have the luxury of working on a game that won’t be rushed out the door. Under the old process we would often have either retail or a publisher pressuring us to ship a game before we were happy with it. Or the more draconian measure of being sued or having the game handed to another developer to finish, (yes those clauses are fairly common) if we wanted to spend more time polishing our little gem… fortunately we have NONE of this,” Fargo added.

InXile’s messaging feels mildly reactionary to word that Double Fine’s first Kickstarted project, Broken Age, grew too big for its boots and shifted to an episodic release in order to fund to completion.

The average backer treats kickstarter as a Pre-order system despite it being drilled into everyone’s head everywhere that it isn’t. You can see this by the amount of people in the cheap ass ‘gimmie the game’ tiers in all of the high profile games (Project Eternity, Shadowrun, Wasteland 2, Double Fine, Torment..)

Indeed one of my backed ones that recently finished – Frontiers – (Similar to Daggerfall/Morrowind), expanded its scope to include full mod support and multiplayer co-op via stretch goals, when the creator said this would understandably push the project back there were people up in arms annoyed that they didn’t ‘pre-order’ this with those features in mind, and wanted a refund. (Nevermind the fact that no money is exchanged hands until a project is finished..there really needs to be a mandatory tutorial or FAQ for new account holders or something)

I don’t even pay notice to ‘Estimated Delivery date’ notices in the tiers anymore these days.